Page 46 of Kiss and Tell
I gathered up the edges of the blanket I’d laid out, hauling the whole thing into a bundle, not caring about the food tumbling off plates and making a mess inside. I thrust it at Ben. “And burn this to ashes.”
Then I walked away to pack and leave Oak Crest for the last time.
Chapter 15
Present
SawyerandIreachthe end of the new dock, but there’s enough light from the quarter moon to see the silvery shape of the old dock across the water. Enough to remind me why I’m not falling for whatever Sawyer is selling.
He slips off his shoes and sits at the end, letting his feet dangle in the water. “Join me?”
I want to pace while I listen, get out some of the tightly wound energy building inside of me, but I follow his lead and sit beside him without a word.
“All right,” he says. “A do-over and why I mean it.”
“This should be good,” I say.
“Maybe not this first part.” He sighs. “Honestly, it took me a while to regret that last morning at camp.” I tense. He’s right: not a great start. “But once I woke up to what an idiot I’d been, I’ve regretted it every day since. The more time goes by, the more I regret it.”
“Glad to hear it.” I am. It’s grimly satisfying, like when one of the mean girls from high school has an ugly kid.
“Then you’ll love the next part, because the reason we’re here right now, you and I, is so I can say I’m sorry.”
Slowly, the tension seeps from my shoulders. It’s the one thing he hasn’t outright said, and until he hinted at it being a reason for buying Oak Crest, I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to hear those words all these years, even when I’d insisted I didn’t care.
“Two years after our last summer here together, I started dating a girl,” Sawyer continues. “I really liked her. I was almost twenty-three, and I figured it was post-college and the right age for me to fall in love for the first time.”
That stings. Maybe everyone wants to believe their first love is mutual. But it’s also very Sawyer to put a timeline on love, to decide it was “time,” as if any of us has any control over that. It makes me think of his backup plan to marry if we’re single at thirty. That’s only a few months away for each of us.
Is he…? No. I doubt every sentence we’ve ever exchanged is burned into his brain like they are into mine. He won’t remember that throwaway bargain if I bring it up, even if it proves his pattern of arbitrary deadlines. Those work for college graduations. Not life events.
He makes a lazy circle in the lake with his foot. “Spoiler alert: that relationship didn’t work out. It made me realize what a jackass I’d been to you, sending Ben out that morning while I ran away. I knew it was wrong at the time, and I tried to apologize for it. But it took me a while to realize how wrong.”
There was a time when I would have given anything to hear those words. I sit with that as he falls into silence. That’s…big. I don’t know how to take it all in.
“I’ve had a couple more relationships since then,” he continues, “but both of them lost steam. It’s a better way to end. It’s less messy that way, you know?”
“Than chucking an emotional hand grenade and running away? Yeah, I know.”
“You’re definitely still mad.” His voice is resigned.
I lean back on my hands and consider that. “No,” I say at last. “I don’t think I am. My old self might still be mad at your old self, but the Tabitha on this dock now is not mad at the Sawyer on this dock now. Current me isn’t even mad at old you. You were a kid.”
“An extremely, super dumb kid?” He quotes my fire ceremony words.
“You heard that?”
“Natalie told me. She was trying to convince me this was an extremely, super dumb idea.”
“So why do it now? Or do it this way? Are you chasing the high of summer camp?” I make the joke because the tension between us has built with each tricky topic we’re tackling.
He faces me directly, the moonlight glinting in his eyes. “Basically. You laugh, but it’s true. When I found out this place was for sale, I came to see it. I don’t know how to explain it, but the second I turned onto the camp road, the last decade disappeared, and I was eighteen-year-old Sawyer, heading into an adventure I had no idea if I could handle.”
It’s an eerie echo of my own feelings when Natalie had driven me in.
“I walked around, looking at the old bones of the place, and I couldn’t separate myself from the past anymore. None of us can, can we? That’s what Natalie says. It shapes us no matter what. And Camp Oak Crest is a big part of who I’ve become. I started figuring out who I was and what I wanted. Found my best friends here. Including you.”
These words soothe me, a balm on old hurts. That’s how I had felt then too.
